


Touch Starved

by icewhisper



Series: Holiday Cheer & Tears [12]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-16 22:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16962756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: The funny thing was that before Len, Mick had been a tactile person.





	Touch Starved

The funny thing was that before Len, Mick had been a tactile person. He’d curl under his mother’s arm on the couch when they watched movies. He’d rough-house with his brothers. He’d throw an arm over a friend’s shoulder.

He wasn’t sure if it was Len that had changed him with the way he’d always flinched away from touch in the early days or if he’d turned himself away from it after his family died and most of his friends disappeared. Maybe it had something to do with juvie and prison, the way he had to stay hyper-aware of not letting someone get too close just in case they had a weapon.

Len stopped flinching from him a year in, but the casual touching he’d had with people before was something he’d never have with his partner. It was fine. He didn’t need it. He’d gotten used to it the same way he’d gotten used to caring for his burns.

People touched him even less after Shreveport. Len was gone and he’d carefully pulled away from Lisa — she’d always been Len’s, not his – and there was nobody else he’d trust to get that close. The burns scared away women unless money was changing hands and his attraction to men mostly started and ended with Len unless the wind blew just right.

He just…got used to not touching people. Len came back with an apology and a gun a couple years later and they fell back into habit. They hovered, but they didn’t touch too often. Sometimes, Len reached for him and it was like a weight had been taken off Mick’s chest and he could finally _breathe_. He’d want to latch on and stay there – relish in the feeling of _touching someone_ – but Len would start to squirm like his skin was crawling and Mick would let him pull away.

Chronos…

He’d spent lifetimes in the armor, buried under Kevlar and metal until he could barely recognize the touch of his own hand on his skin. When they’d shed him from it and left him in the cell with clothes that hadn’t been his in over a century, the fabric itched. It wasn’t his. Not his clothes. Not his skin. He spit and he seethed, but he didn’t feel like he was in his own body.

He let the others cycle through, talking and pretending they cared while they kept him locked in his cage. They looked and they talked, but they never came close enough to touch. Someone probably would have gotten hurt, if they had.

Then, Len had to walk in with one of his fucked up versions of an apology and a death wish.

He’d come so close. They’d fought over the years, verbal mostly, but physical at their worst moments. Mick tried to keep it from happening, didn’t want Len to think it was their normal the way he did with Lewis.

The fight in the cell was the worst they’d ever had, partly because Mick had been so _angry_ and partly because Len hadn’t even tried to fight back. He’d walked in there as a self-appointed sacrificial lamb in ways that would make his shrink’s head spin if they ever got back to Central.

He hoped they did.

He was pretty sure he needed his shrink too.

But they never got back to Central. He and Len had barely even started to fix things before his husband went and got himself killed like the big-hearted idiot he pretended he wasn’t. The others called him a hero – and, _fuck_ , would Len have hated that – and moved on with their lives.

Mick was left alone with an old ring and a ghost in his head.

Amaya hugged him and he didn’t know what to do. He’d forgotten how to deal with people and how to accept a touch.

The panic attack he’d had after she left went unwitnessed except for a Len who wasn’t really there in the first place.

“You need people,” Len said one time, long after Mick had told people he wasn’t hallucinating anymore. He closed his eyes at the sound of Len’s voice like it would shut him away and wondered if it made him less crazy if the hallucination was only auditory. “You’re not like me, Mick. You never were.”

He _was_ like Len, always had been in the ways that counted. He opened his eyes and his mouth, ready to tell Len that – to tell him that he didn’t give a single fuck about the little stuff – but Len was looking at him like Mick was breaking the heart he pretended he didn’t have. It made his breath catch. He’d never been able to handle Len when the man was upset. Len acted like things didn’t bother him, because they mostly didn’t, but the stuff that mattered…

Len reached out and laid a hand on Mick’s arm that Mick hadn’t even been able to properly feel when Len was alive. He felt nothing, still, not even when Len’s hand went down to over Mick’s.

The tease of a touch that Len rarely tried to initiate. The reminder that it wasn’t _real_.

He pressed his eyes closed again and tried to pretend his lashes weren’t wet.

“You gotta let me go,” he heard Len whisper eventually. “You don’t need me.”

Yes, he did. God, he fucking needed him. Two years and he still felt like he was searching for something that wasn’t really there anymore.

“Please.” Len’s voice sounded strained, that weird overly-controlled thing he did when he was trying to keep himself level. It usually just ended up making him sound like he wanted to cry.

 _No can do, Lenny_ , he wanted to say. The words didn’t come. He didn’t move. He barely breathed.

He fell asleep there with a touch he couldn’t feel and the uncomfortable cushioning of the bench press against his back.

 

 

He woke up to the heavy weight of Len’s head on his stomach and fingers tangled with his.

He woke up with…

Len stirred, face turned into the fabric of Mick’s shirt the way he always used to hide his face in a pillow, and blue eyes blinked open, peeking out. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Mick whispered back. This was…different. His hallucinations had never allowed for touch before, but this was… It felt too real. The familiar weight of Len on him. The way Len’s fingers twitched in his grip, either through compulsion or the want to pull away.

He should have let him pull away.

He didn’t.

He held on tighter, determined to hold onto the hallucination as long as he could.

Sara found them in the same spots when she came looking for him later. Shouting. Weapons. Threats. By the time Mick was able to wrap his mind around the idea that _Len_ wasn’t just in his mind, Len was shut up in the cell and getting scanned by Gideon while he explained that he’d been stuck in the time stream since the Oculus blew.

“I didn’t even get any cool powers out of it,” Len complained at the end like the fucking child he was.

“So what _did_ you get?” Sara asked, arms crossed tight over her chest. She was still clutching her knife as if she was expecting Len to come lunging at them through the glass. He wasn’t. He’d sat himself down against the back wall and sprawled out like a damn cat.

Len’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “I bonded with it enough that my body can’t handle the timestream,” he explained. “It makes it too unstable.”

“So Mick’s hallucinations…” Sara trailed off, glancing at him carefully.

“Me, myself, and I.”

“You never told him it was you.”

“I thought I was _hallucinating_ ,” Mick cut in. “Even I know you don’t listen to the voices in your head. I wouldn’t have believed him.”

“I can’t stay here,” Len added. “I won’t be able to hold form. Part of my deal with the time stream is that I get my body and get the hell out of its territory.”

“You pissed it off, didn’t you?” Mick asked, even as he was starting to realize Len hadn’t been talking to _him_ back in his room.

The grin Len gave him was unapologetic. “I’m persistent.”

 

 

They didn’t go back to Central. Mick had been ready to, but Len had grumbled about Barry’s problem with _not_ fucking with time making things harder. As much as Len missed it, Central wasn’t an option.

They settled in Boston instead, well away from Central and its meta issues. It wasn’t without _crime_ , because Len could never settle down like a normal person, but his body stayed stable and Barry had agreed to not come near the east coast unless the world was ending.

“Did you really become friends with Washington?” Len asked him one day when they were lying in bed. He slid up against Mick’s side, still skittish about touch, but bullheaded enough that he did it anyway. _You gotta touch people_ , Len had told him, _and I’m not letting other people do it_.

Mick hummed, one arm thrown carefully across Len’s waist. “Yep. Georgie.”

“You called him Georgie,” Len repeated.

“Yep.”

Len shook his head and laid it on Mick’s shoulder. “Did you screw him?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” Len mused. “I woulda given you a pass for that.”

Mick pinched him.

The End

 


End file.
